June 5, 2011 - Easter 7

God's Work. Our Hands.
Acts 1:6-14; John 17:1-11
Easter 7A – June 5, 2011

God's work. Our hands. That's the tagline of the ELCA. You may have heard it a time or two, or seen it on the front page of our website, or read it on the synod poster that hangs on the bulletin board as you enter the church building. It's a pretty straightforward slogan, revealing both our denomination's mission and our identity. God's work. Our hands. God has a plan. God has a vision. God has work to do, and as followers of Jesus, we are partners in that work. We are called to participate in God's dream for the world, not just inside the walls of our churches, but in the world “out there”. That is our mission as a church – to be doing God's work with our hands.

It is also our identity, because we believe that it is something we are already doing. Imperfectly, of course. Incompletely, yes. But we can look around at what the church is doing – not just this individual congregation, but our synod – the regional branch of our denomination, and also the national church – the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – and we can point to the many and various ways that God is using our hands to accomplish God's work.

This is not a new thing. This has been God's call to God's people ever since there were people. This has been the invitation of God from the very beginning – for people to work with God, to be God's partners in doing God's work in the world. You can see it in the creation story – when God creates Adam and Eve and places them in the garden, and tells them to till it and keep it, to be fruitful and multiply. We see it in the life story of Abraham and Sarah, who were promised that they would be blessed – so that through them, all the nations of the world would be blessed. We see it in the gospel story, as Jesus prays for his disciples on night of his betrayal. (Remember, we're still on Maundy Thursday, as we have been the past several weeks, listening to Jesus share his final words.) Read a few more verses past where this selection ends and we hear Jesus saying that he is sending his followers into the world just as he himself had been sent. And we hear it too in the words of the first lesson, which comes to us from the book of Acts, as the disciples gather around Jesus, 40 days after he rose from the dead, just as he is about to ascend into heaven. “...you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

“You will be my witnesses,” Jesus says. The disciples are left behind – but left behind with a purpose. We hear Jesus say in John that he had finished the work God had given him to do – but the work's not done yet. There is still more to do, and so these disciples, these apostles (which means “sent ones”) are called by Jesus to testify to what God had done in Jesus, to tell Jesus' story and how it had connected with their own stories, and how they had been drawn more deeply into God's story. They are commissioned not just to tell this story with their words, but to live it out with their lives; they are to continue doing what they had first learned from Jesus – the things that they had seen and experienced him doing – healing, and teaching, and forgiving sins; welcoming the sinner and outcast, proclaiming the good news of God's kingdom coming near. Ordinary men and women, not so different than you and I, called to be partners in God's work, called to do God's work with their hands.

That's exactly what they did, of course. Starting close to home in Jerusalem, but eventually branching out, in ever-widening circles. The whole book of Acts is one story after another about how they did just that.

Our church could write our own book of Acts to remind us of the many and various ways we have been involved in doing God's work with our hands. From the wider church down to our local congregation – Lutheran Disaster response – on the ground when disaster strikes, & often the last to leave. They were here after 9/11 & only in the past year or so did they close up shop. The Lutheran church & its people are still on the ground in New Orleans and beyond, helping victims of Hurricane Katrina. At work in Japan, and Haiti, reaching out in the wake of tornadoes and flooding, providing money and supplies and workers to repair the physical destruction, but also there with listening ears and open hearts and prayerful spirits to sustain their emotional and spiritual needs. Local food pantries. Soup kitchens. After-school centers. Congregations and synods who look around their neighborhoods and see the needs of their neighbors, and then creatively come up with ways to meet those needs. People giving of themselves, their time, their possessions to share the love of God with a world in need – this is what it looks like to do God's work with our hands.

But perhaps you feel more like the disciples in this Acts story, left looking up at the sky as Jesus disappears. I always imagine them just kind of dumbfounded, not knowing what to do, not knowing what to say. The two men in the white robes show up and say, “Why are you staring at the sky? Jesus will come the same way you saw him go...” and so the disciples look around at each other, like “Now what? How are we supposed to be witnesses?” Maybe you feel like you've never really figured that part out either. We look at what those followers of Jesus did, maybe even listen to the stories of what the people of the church are doing out there, and wonder how we can possibly do that ourselves. We have other commitments, after all – work, and family, and helping with the PTA or Girl & Boy Scouts or volunteering at the hospital – all of the million and one demands on our time, and it seems impossible to add one more thing to the to-do list, even if it is to do God's work with our own hands.

But the thing is, you're already doing it. You're already a partner in God's vision for the world, whenever you are living your life in love – when you give of yourself to someone else – when you are parenting or grandparenting, caring for aging parents, visiting the sick and homebound. When you make that investment of time in someone else's life – watching the neighbor's kids or mowing the lawn or shoveling the snow; when you do your job ethically, with honor and integrity, when you make decisions that consider their impact on your neighbors across the nation and the globe and not just what may be best for yourself – In becoming fully the people God created us to be, not just by what we do on Sunday mornings or within the walls of the church, but by recognizing that what we do with our whole selves, every day, matters to God – that's also what it looks like to partner with God – to do the work God has given us to do, faithfully, right where we are, in the middle of our normal, everyday lives. Doing that, we glorify God – and know we, too, are doing God's work. Our hands. Thanks be to God! Amen.